Isolation Boredom

So the current global pandemic and forced self-isolation has given me a great opportunity to really dig into the Outback MATE protocol, and I have figured out all of the important details! (documented on my GitHub project)

I also started working on an Arduino-compatible library (currently far less featured) which is mostly useful as a way to convert the 9-bit MATE data to 8-bit PJON frames which mean I no longer need to use hacky methods in Python and can run things a LOT faster.

uMATE gave me a convenient way to sniff traffic between two devices and send it to Wireshark:

This has been immensely helpful for figuring out the remaining details, as I can capture & monitor traffic in real-time and compare it with the MATE readouts. It helped me discover that the MATE actually synchronizes the devices every minute or so by reading/writing specific registers - and this is how the FLEXnet DC can know the date, time, and battery temperature without actually having an RTC or temperature sensor.

I was able to discover the meaning of the remaining bytes in the MX status packet, and implemented status packets for the FLEXnet DC monitor.